Leaks that go with the information flow

Technology is about to transform the way we buy and use learning, Nigel Paine says

The clock is ticking for learning in the 21st century. To be successful we have to transform the relationship between people and our education infrastructure.

The pressures that are changing our economy, the nature of employment and jobs will not only have an impact on education, but will make demands on the education world that have never been made before. In a knowledge economy the knowledge professionals will be held to account.

What are the patterns then for the future? The Scottish Council for Educational Technology is holding a conference the weekend of November 5-6, that will give a platform to some of the world's leading education theorists and look at innovations in schools and colleges. This is not a peripheral issue for higher education.

Carol Twigg, a learning technology expert in the United States, describes the pressure on education as the four "D" words. These are:

* Disintermediation.

* Disaggregation.

* Diffusion.

* Differentiation.

Disintermediation: people will be able to check out not just a brochure on a website of a learning institution, but sample lectures, the quality of the tutorials, the record of the students, the success rate in a particular course, etc. The result will be more precise and demanding customers.

Disaggregation: as mass storage becomes commonplace, the present huge curricula will be broken into small, manageable chunks that can be reassembled, depending on demand and need. The education object economy model that is being developed in the United States works using a database of education objects. These can be as short as 15 minutes equivalent of learning. They are tagged using a common meta-language and stored in a database, so that thousands of fragments can be correctly filed and retrieved as required.

Customers may come to purchase learning from more than one institution: online materials from one place; tutorial support from somewhere else; individual tuition from a third institution. This will all be held together by the power of the internet to shift time and make place irrelevant.

Diffusion: reflects the gradual dissemination of technology into the community to the point where major lifestyle changes begin to take place. One person in the street with a television is a novelty; everybody in the street, a lifestyle change.

Differentiation: the ability to reaggregate materials to suit specific needs. I call this "just in time" and "just for me" learning.

These are the inevitable directions the growing use of technology will take. They are simple, logical extensions of its present use in industry. The pressure they generate will be impossible to resist. The issue will be who gets there first, who does this most thoroughly, and who dares to break the mould, potentially wins.

If higher education is going to radically increase the number of part-time adult learners, it will not be able to house them. Instead, communications into the workplace or the home will become the means of creating lively, active virtual campuses. How prepared will those potential learners be when they leave school to accept a lifetime of learning? What relevance will their school-based qualifications be as a preparation for this?

There is evidence in both Australia and the United States that more graduates are going into further education to equip themselves for work than further education students are using vocational opportunities to go on to higher education.

There must be a symbiosis between the two. Both require core skills in schools that enable learners to adapt to a greater frequency of studying, increasing independence as content, support and resources are decoupled.

Sectors so strictly differentiated until now will not necessarily merge, but will leak one into the other. The higher education professional will want to know more than ever before how learning takes place in school and college.

This in turn will have a big impact on the curriculum. We want people with certain skills, including process skills such as the use of libraries and computers. We want students who are comfortable with technology as a tool not a subject. This will affect not only the nature of the curriculum but the means of testing and assessment. As we move into a period of rapid change, it becomes less clear who has the right to define what has to be modified.

Microsoft's Bill Gates, in an article for the New York Times, claims that in today's emerging information society, the critical natural resources are human intelligence, skill and leadership. Every region of the world has these in abundance. The differentiator is the way in which the natural skills are developed, honed and focused.

The key word is "leakiness". Leakiness between the broader needs of society and the education system in general; between sectors within the education system; between the institution, the home, the workplace and the community; and between societies and the global economy.

In many ways, we have to learn to love leakiness and see it as a way of building solidity and strength in an uncertain environment, not as a threat to our power base and hegemony. If it is the dawn of the learning age, then one thing is certain; we are going to do an awful lot more learning.

Nigel Paine is chief executive, Scottish Council for Educational Technology, and visiting professor in new learning technologies, Napier University.